Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field. Still more particularly, it relates to a method, system and computer-usable medium for combining network traffic for variable bit width workloads.
Description of the Related Art
It is known to provide large scale computing platforms, such as an IBM System z mainframe computing platform with an operating system, such as the z/OS operating system provided by IBM Corporation. For example, the z/OS operating system includes a subsystem called the Communications Server (CS), which includes a storage manager subsystem called the Common Storage Manager (CSM) for use by Systems Network Architecture (SNA) and/or TCP/IP protocol stacks to perform input/output (I/O) operations.
It is known to configure an IBM System z mainframe type computer platform with a network adapter such as an IBM Open Systems Adapter (OSA) type adapter. The IBM Open Systems Adapter (OSA) type adapter is a hardware element that interfaces between an IBM S/390 or zSeries processor and a network, which may be a private network within an enterprise, a public network, or a combination of both. The OSA type adapter enables the computer platform to virtualize and abstract details of an actual hardware Network Interface Card (NIC). The host communicates with the OSA type adapter and the OSA type adapter communicates with the NIC. The OSA type adapter provides many advantages, primarily in the area of sharing and virtualization.
FIG. 1, labeled Prior Art, shows an example of a mainframe type computing platforms where the operating system is enabled at a certain bit width communications (e.g., at 64-bit wide) for one transport layer (e.g. a TCP/IP transport layer) but not enabled for the bit width communications for another transport layer (e.g. a SNA/EE transport layer). In this example, inbound data is received from an OSA type adapter (e.g., a 10 GbE OSA adapter) and feeds both stacks and upper layer application program interfaces (APIs). As data is received from a network for the SNA/EE transport layer (which is not enabled for 64 bit communications) the 64 bit OS (e.g. via a device driver) must copy all data back to 31 bit virtual memory before the data can be presented to a SNA stack. In scenarios where the adapter is running near line speed and a larger portion of the inbound traffic (e.g. 70%) is associated with the SNA stack (and its applications) then the in-line processing cycles to copy the data and manage the additional memory can be extensive (degrading the SNA performance when upgrading the OS to 64 bit virtual memory support).